Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

phists often overlook questions of gender or actively dismiss them. Withoutgender consciousness certain important discrepancies disappear from view,discrepancies between a woman’s access to resources and a man’s, betweena woman’s rights and a man’s, and between a woman’s sheer individualityand a man’s. And of course where such discrepancies are erased, they canbe disregarded. As with gender, so with spirit: without consciously takinginto account the spiritual dimension of earthly life, including how our spiritualorigins and destinations shape the course of our lives, and without asense for the unique, soul-spiritual core of each single human being, we seeourselves and each other as interchangeable parts in a machine or membersof a herd whose behavior, however complex and magnificent, is essentiallypredictable and therefore controllable. For views that neglect the reality ofspirit, just as for those that neglect gender, deny human individuality.Individuality is the crux, it is the crossing point where gender consciousnessand spirit consciousness coincide and strengthen one another.Rudolf Steiner recognized a spiritually radical yet socially harmoniousindividualism, “ethical individualism,” he sometimes called it. He saw individualityas the key to human relations of difference and of equality. Hispassages on ethical individualism articulate a fundamental dynamic that Icall the paradox of “shared uniqueness”; in other words, uniqueness is theprimary trait that we all share.In presenting uniqueness as a social problem—a problem in doingjustice to both difference and equality—Steiner highlights the issue raised bythe woman who declared that she could not be a feminist because she wascommitted to being a humanist. In a chapter of his book, Die Philosophie DerFreiheit, 1 entitled “Individual and Genus,” he avoids making individual theopposite of society, contrasting individual with type instead. He says thatwhen human beings view each other generically, as types, they cannot hopeto understand one another. To illustrate this, he uses misunderstandingsand inequities that are based on gender; so it seems as if, like the womanwho preferred humanism to feminism, Steiner too would find feminism animpediment to social harmony. He writes:“The tendency to judge according to the genus is at its most stubbornwhere we are concerned with differences of sex. Almost invariablyman sees in woman, and woman in man, too much of the general characterof the other sex and too little of what is individual.” (p. 200)Here Steiner seems to perceive exactly the situation feared by thosewho suspect feminism of being divisive: that emphasizing gender exacerbatesthe already deplorably prevalent anti-humane tendencies in social life. Butas he continues, he makes gender a category in his analysis, and significant304